Hideo Kojima’s Mission Unlocked

“My role in this world is to keep on making big games for as long as I can,” Hideo Kojima says.

Photograph by Jamie Simonds / Camera Press / Redux

It has been a difficult year for Hideo Kojima. Although Metal Gear Solid V, the project that the video-game director worked on for more than five years, launched in September to enviable sales and widespread acclaim, its creation was not without complications. In mid-March, the game’s Japanese publisher, Konami, removed Kojima’s name and that of his studio, Kojima Productions, from its Web site and the game’s box. Reports surfaced that Kojima’s contract with the company would end in December, and that his studio would be disbanded. On Tuesday, the breakup was made semi-official, in the form of a corporate memo that Konami reputedly leaked to Nikkei, perhaps as a way of preëmpting Kojima’s optimistic statement on Twitter the following day.

Now that his employment contract has expired, Kojima is able to speak freely about what he describes as a “new start”—a relaunched, independent Kojima Productions. (He remains, however, contractually forbidden from talking about the prior split.) The studio currently comprises four staff members, including Yoji Shinkawa, the artist with whom Kojima has collaborated since Shinkawa left college, and Kenichiro Imaizumi, a former producer at Konami. There is, as yet, no office, but there is a contract in place with Sony Computer Entertainment, which is partnering with Kojima on his next title. The details of that game, if they are settled, have yet to emerge, but the arduous months at Konami have apparently done nothing to dull Kojima’s interest in making the kind of filmic, lavish productions for which he is best known. “Every time I create a game, I think it’s going to be the last time,” he told me. “In much the same way that a mother isn’t thinking about her next pregnancy during childbirth, I can’t think of the next game till the one I’m working on is out.”

Kojima is no stranger to fresh starts. His father was employed by a pharmaceutical company, which took him all over Japan. The family moved often throughout the nineteen-sixties. Kojima found stability in stories, as peripatetic children sometimes do. When he was eleven, he bought a copy of Isaac Asimov’s “Fantastic Voyage,” a novelization of the science-fiction film, from 1966, about a group of minuscule men and women who travel through a dying man’s brain, looking for a way to save him. Meanwhile, he was watching generous amounts of Japanese and American TV, including “Kamen Rider,” “Devilman,” “Bewitched,” “Columbo,” and “Little House on the Prairie.” His plan for the future was straightforward, in the manner of all childhood ambition. He would win an award as a science-fiction author and leverage this success to become a film director. But then, when he was thirteen, his father died. Instead of going to university in Tokyo, as he had planned, Kojima stayed close to his mother. He studied economics, with a gathering sense of frustration.

The launch of the Famicom, Nintendo’s defining home video-game system of the nineteen-eighties, presented an opportunity to Kojima, who had previously had little interest in the medium. Famicom cartridges allowed players to save games in progress, enabling designers to write longer stories that could be told in multiple sittings. “Immediately it struck me that this might be another route into making film-like experiences,” Kojima told me. His vision, however, strained against the technological and cultural limitations of the hardware. “It was like the era of the silent films,” he said. “Games were composed of simple actions like those seen in old Chaplin or Keaton movies: running, jumping, digging, throwing. There could be no significant story themes or messages. I kept on putting story in my games.
Some players complained that I was sermonizing. But I wanted to find a way to relate these games to life, not just as toys to play with, but as something that will stick with the player through life.”

Now that game makers are able to render their characters and worlds in realistic detail, Kojima believes that Japanese designers have struggled. “Games matured beyond simple interactive toys and into a rich medium that could deliver drama and other deeper elements,” he said. “At that point, Japanese games became a hard sell: their sensibilities and cultural identity were distinct and unrelatable.” Kojima’s early exposure to Western entertainment, he said, helped him avoid that trap. The 1998 edition of Metal Gear Solid, one of the best-selling games for Sony’s PlayStation, was set in Alaska. Its moments of anime-style exuberance were tempered by global themes and concerns. The success of the game taught Kojima both directorial and business lessons. “The only way to create high-end games is to target the global market,” he said. “But in order to target the global market, the management behind the project needs to have a keen sense for what will work, and be willing to take risks.” Konami’s recent shift away from big-budget games and toward the low-investment, high-return mobile market has surely been a factor in Kojima’s departure from the company. “If you’re only focussed on the profits immediately in front of you, the times will leave you behind,” he said. “It becomes impossible to catch up again.”

For Kojima, the future involves ridding himself of distracting responsibilities. “When working in big companies, especially Japanese companies, every little thing has to be approved beforehand, and you need paperwork to do anything,” he said. “Now that I’m independent, I can do what I want with much more speed. I don’t need to invest time in unnecessary presentations. I shoulder the risk.” He also relishes the chance to speak his mind. “When I was in a company, my personal statements could be taken as the over-all direction of the company. As such, I couldn’t say just anything.”

In the weeks following his departure from Konami, Kojima considered taking a mind-cleansing trip to a deserted island for a year. When he explained the plan to “a Hollywood friend,” he was cautioned against it. Kojima owed it to his own talent, the friend said, to keep up the pace. “Hearing that affirmed to me that my role in this world is to keep on making big games for as long as I can,” Kojima said. “That is the mission I’ve been given in life.”

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